Clinton's secret police state

Charles R. Smith is a noted investigative journalist. For over 20 years, Smith has covered areas of national security and information warfare. He frequently appears on national television for the Fox network and is a popular guest on radio shows all over America.

President Clinton has waged an information war against America.
Data accumulated inside the White House has taken prisoners,
destroyed lives and provided valuable bounty for criminals. The
war is designed to limit freedoms and control political
opponents.

Recent examples, such as campaigns against Kathleen Willey and Monica
Lewinsky, are lurid tips of the White House iceberg. The most fertile
ground
for information exploited by Clinton is the data stored inside law
enforcement computers such as the FBI.

The FBI’s NCIC system (National Criminal Information Center) is
a network of computers erected by all the states that is tied to
a central FBI network. It is the federal law enforcement
Internet.

NCIC is a valuable tool to capture real criminals. NCIC was
used to identify the vehicle in the New York towers bombing. It
was NCIC that tipped Oklahoma police to hold Timothy McVeigh as a
possible suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing. NCIC is used to
check your status whenever a local police officer pulls you over
on the road.

However, this system also has a long history of abuse. It has
been used by an ex-police officer to stalk and kill his battered
wife. It has been used by drug gangs to identify and murder
anti-narcotics undercover agents.

NCIC has also been used for political crimes. Each and every
one of the over 900 files held by the Clinton White House
started with a check of the FBI NCIC data base. According to
the FBI, the White House inquired for information from the FBI
on over 22,000 people during 1993 and 1994.

There is open evidence the FBI computers were abused by Clinton.
In June 1996, Lisa Wetzl, former White House intern under Craig
Livingstone, testified during the Senate hearings that the very
first task performed for White House reviews was a NCIC check.

In 1996, Howard Shapiro, then general counsel for the FBI, went
to the White House to recover some of the hundreds of files
taken by Clinton operatives Craig Livingstone and Anthony
Marceca. According Shapiro’s deposition there was the following
exchange:

“Q. The list of names were in two boxes, is that correct?”

“A. Yes. The — the documents referred to in the list of names
were in two boxes.”

“Q. And the third box contained what kind of documents that you
determined were not FBI files?”

“A. For instance — and it would seem to comport with what’s on
this first page — various computer runs, various documents. It
took us a while, and I’m — I’m not sure I was ever advised in
detail what it was. I was advised that I didn’t need to worry
about it was because it wasn’t FBI information. It was like
NCIC computer checks and things like that.”

The legal counsel for the FBI had no law enforcement experience.
Mr. Shapiro did not know NCIC computer information is FBI
property so he left the boxes of computer information at the
White House. They have never been recovered.

In August 1996, I received a letter from the Department of Justice,
Margaret R. Owens — unit chief of the Office of Public and
Congressional Affairs. Owens wrote: “Unfortunately, the
process of dealing with White House requests for file
information was not managed as it should have been. You may be
assured that all steps necessary to correct the deficiency have
been taken and that the FBI will be more vigilant in the
future.”

However, the Clinton administration has little zeal for being
“vigilant.” There are no federal laws against government
officials who abuse the NCIC system, and President Clinton wants
to keep it that way.

Government employees who are caught can be charged with a local
misdemeanor at best. In response to this lack-of-teeth in the
law, Sen. Gregg, R-NH, proposed legislation in 1997 to make
abuse of NCIC data files a felony. Clinton opposed Gregg’s bill
and had it defeated by Democrats in the Senate.

While giving his political operatives clear fields to run
rampant inside federal computer files, Clinton has strived to
accumulate more data for abuse. President Clinton made cynical
use of the victims from the TWA-800 disaster to propose a whole
new series of laws to combat terrorism, including expanding the
FBI NCIC system to track the movements of every flying citizen.

According to the FBI and NTSB investigation, the TWA-800 crash
was not caused by a terrorist bomb or enemy missile but by a
faulty design in the central fuel tank.

Many more lives could be saved by hiring more FAA inspectors
than by spending millions assuming that every flying citizen
might be a “trans-national” terrorist. More lives can be saved
with proper safety inspections made on the airplane than by
inspecting the personal lives of the passengers boarding the
plane.

The entire Clinton approach to law enforcement has been designed
to limit freedom and obtain more power for Federal forces. The
“pro” law enforcement stance of the Democrat President silenced
left-wing privacy advocates in the Democratic party and drew the
applause of traditional Republicans.

Privacy advocates and right wing police supporters should learn
that President Clinton makes the policy not to fight crime but
for pure political power. The only difference between a
Communist police state and a Nazi police state is which boot —
right or left — is on your neck. The Clinton compromise is both
boots on your neck.

One way to justify a power grab was to issue studies supporting
ideas that are alien to America. For example, the White House
hired the Rand Corporation to do a study of transnational terror
and information warfare. Somewhere in the study the brains at
Rand forgot the Constitution.

The Rand report states, “An important factor is the traditional
change in the government’s role as one moves from national
defense through public safety toward things that represent the
public good. Clearly, the government’s perceived role in this
area will have to be balanced against public perceptions of the
loss of civil liberties and the commercial sector’s concern
about unwarranted limits on its practices and markets.”

The word from Rand … capitalists, conservatives,
constitutionalists and liberal privacy lovers beware. Your
markets and civil liberties are at risk of being sacrificed in
the name of the “public good.”

The administration use of propaganda to dehumanize an imaginary
domestic enemy of American citizens included issuing lies and
fiction to itself. In 1993, the FBI issued a top secret report
to President Clinton claiming that mass media computer security
software could be used by criminals and terrorists to block
federal wiretaps.

The FBI linked every crime imaginable to the need to ban the
mass media PC software. The FBI report noted that a child
“snuff” film ring was prosecuted using phone wire taps, implying
that more children would be murdered on film unless computer
security software was banned.

The FBI later told Congress the “snuff” story was false. No
such ring existed. The top secret report was a fiction.

The FBI has claimed in public testimony that the Trade Tower
bombers were caught using wiretaps of their phone. The fact is
the terrorists were caught using an informant and a video camera
hooked up inside their bomb factory. No wiretap information
was produced at their trial.

The FBI has claimed to Congress that mobster John Gotti was
prosecuted with wiretaps. The fact is no wire taps were used
in Gotti’s trial because he never used the phone for business.
The FBI caught Gotti with a radio-microphone bug placed inside
his home.

The FBI has sought access to millions of phone lines, claiming a
need to expand wire taps against domestic terrorists and
criminals. The fact is the FBI has issued on average about a
thousand wiretaps a year for the last 10 years. None of the
cases taken to prosecution involved violent terrorism crimes.

Meanwhile, the Democrats and the president claim to favor the
privacy of the little people — such as Monica Lewinsky. The
White House generated outrage over Linda Tripp and her tapes of
Monica are so false as to be laughable. Political Watergate-like
break-ins and illegal third party taping of phone calls have become the
norm under Clinton.

For example, Democrat Congressman McDermott released a tape of
House Speaker Gingrich talking to other Republicans taken from
an illegally monitored cellular phone call. The Reno-led Department
of Justice has not prosecuted McDermott. With Reno running
the show, don’t hold your breath waiting.

Nor is the war just between Democrat and Republican. Inner
party fist fights are becoming more vicious than the traditional
two-party combat. For example, Senator Charles Robb had to
dismiss two of his staff for illegally taping the phone calls of
Democratic rival Governor Douglas Wilder. The subject of the
Wilder phone taps was the hot relationship between the single
black governor and a rich white widow.

The victors and the vanquished litter the new information
battlefield. Clinton, McDermott and Robb are still in elected
office but Gingrich and Wilder are gone. Politicians in the
next century who are not electronically literate will find
themselves on the back bench or out of office.

The modern world is full of computer tracking systems. Each of
us creates an electronic image. You live in various databases
or radiowaves in the sky as you move about doing business and
living in the modern world. The use of your own electronic
emissions against you is a form of oppression. The intent is to
deny your freedom and increase the power of a few.

We must choose not to be tagged, tracked and controlled like
some horrific animal experiment. We can remain individuals in a
collective modern democracy. Law and order can be maintained
without having to compromise our liberty. Justice can be done
to those who abuse the system.

We can free ourselves and the world or enslave it. Technology
can increase liberties and markets but only if we want it to do
so. It is up to us to choose the path to tomorrow, electronic
freedom or digital slavery.